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Keep your eyes on Netflix' social accounts from November 6-12; that's when their annual Geeked Week goes down, and according to a promo poster for the event, they'll be featuring something about Orion and the Dark.

Geeked Week is a free virtual event that features news, new trailers and whatnot. Keep a particular eye on their Twitter/X accounts, though it'll probably pop up on YouTube, FB and the other usuals as well.

Thanks to u/pavingmomentum!

May 2024 will see the publication of A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories "to commemorate 100 years since Kafka's death," and one of those stories is written by our pal Charlie!

I wonder if the Kafkaesque story will be Kaufmanesque?!

Via The Bookseller:

“What happens when one of the most idiosyncratic and visionary imaginations of the 20th century meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English today?” the publisher teased. “From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these 10 specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.” (Source)

Other authors included: Ali Smith, Joshua Cohen, Elif Batuman, Naomi Alderman, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Leone Ross.

Can't wait!

Thanks to the ever reliable u/pavingmomentum.

Charlie and Eva HD will shortly be rocking up to Kingston, Ontario. Says the Kingston Whig Standard:

Kaufman will be at the Broom Factory in Kingston Thursday night and at the Hotel Wolfe Island Saturday night.

At both events, he will be joined by poet Eva H.D., who wrote the screenplay for “Jackals & Fireflies,” a new short film directed by Kaufman.

The film will only be screened at the Wolfe Island event. [...]

Thursday’s event at the Broom Factory, which is being presented by the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, will see Kaufman and Eva H.D. discuss writing, filmmaking and collaborating. It starts at 8:30 p.m. (doors open at 8) and admission is $25, with proceeds going to the not-for-profit Wolfe Island Commons.

Saturday’s event on Wolfe Island starts at 9 p.m. (doors at 8) on the Wolfe Island Commons waterfront stage, across from the Hotel Wolfe Island in Marysville. (It will be moved inside the hotel if it rains.)

At the conclusion of the 20-minute film, there will be a question-and-answer session with the screenwriter and director. The event is free, but donations are welcome and preregistration recommended. (Source)

You can pre-register here.

This'll be quick, because I'm on mobile. Zoom workshop with Charlie K and Boots Riley this Monday! Info here!

Here's the video of that interview posted by Variety earlier in the week. Charlie talks about the WGA strike; A.I. and how it parallels his unproduced script Frank or Francis; Jackals, Ending Things and why Charlie is a character in Antkind. Video below, articles here and here.

That's a Charlie quote, from an interview he's done with Variety while in Sarajevo.

“It’s disgusting, because they don’t do anything[...] No, they do damage is what they do. They do damage to the art form. And by doing that, they do damage to humanity. And if everything is about the bottom line for them and saving money, then there’s nothing left to the art form.”

[...] Throughout the week, he’s been spotted on the streets of the Bosnian capital wearing a gray T-shirt reading “Writers Guild on Strike.” During an interview with Variety, Kaufman peeled off one layer to reveal a second WGA-branded T-shirt beneath it. (Source)

Click through and you'll find his thoughts on Disney's CEO Bob Iger, other studio bosses, A.I. and the latest round of WGA negotiations.

If you're in Toronto next month, you might want to grab tickets to a screening of Jackals & Fireflies at the Paradise Theatre, Bloor Street West Toronto, Wednesday, 13th September.

Join us for the theatrical premiere of a new short film written by poet and author Eva H.D. and directed by Academy Award Winner Charlie Kaufman. The screening will be followed by an in person Q&A with the filmmakers!

A woman wanders the streets of New York City, takes buses and trains, sits in bars and coffee shops, experiencing the city’s diverse neighbourhoods, while thinking about her life, her loneliness, unrequited love. She finds moments of communion with various people she meets along the way and with the city itself.

Wednesday September 13th, 8 PM/7 PM Doors (Source)

Tickets and more info at the link!

After delivering a masterclass in Sarajevo, Charlie stopped by the Agelast podcast for a chat. What resulted was a 30 minute conversation about time, death, regret and all the breakfasts you've ever had. It's a worthwhile 30 minutes! I only wish the interviewer had more time with Charlie. Most of the conversation revolved around Synecdoche, New York and I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

via r/kaufman

Way back in the day, Newmarket Press published the official shooting script book for Synecdoche, New York (as they have done for CK's other films). Alongside some other extra features like behind-the-scenes photos and whatnot, there's a really great interview conducted by Rob Feld. I haven't read this interview before... but BCKster Jan took a hit to the wallet for all of us, buying an exhorbitantly priced copy of the book on eBay. And NOW WE CAN READ THE INTERVIEW. It's a bit of a rarity, because Charlie talks somewhat more freely about what's going on under the hood of his film, and why certain choices were made.

[...] we were able to schedule it in such a way that we were able to shoot all of Phil’s relationship with Catherine Keenerup front, the first thing we did. [...] Phil [Seymour Hoffman] and Catherine know each other because they did Capote together. They're friends and comfortable with each other, and they did a lot of improvisation—not on-screen so much, but in rehearsal—to establish the relationship between these two characters. [...] I think his feeling of being unmoored worked partially because we started with them together. We came in and did all this work but then, all of a sudden, Catherine was gone. The experience of making this movie was so intense, the days were so long and Phil worked so hard that Phil and I would say to each other two weeks after Catherine was done shooting, “God, it feels like seven years since we saw Catherine.” We both felt it and there was a real sadness to it, which I really, really think helped. And that wasn’t planned. That was just lucky.

I very much wanted to emphasize that it was from Caden’s point of view. It’s a very personal experience, so there’s really little in the way it's shot that isn’t from Caden’s point of view. There’s one moment in the movie toward the end where you have a bird’s-eye view of him walking down the street when he’s very old, but that’s it. Everything else is seen as he sees it, which is a very specific choice, maybe even more than I realized. We couldn’t, and do not, have any establishing shots in this movie, not one, with the exception of that bird’s-eye view, if you could call it that. And so it gives it a sort of uncomfortable feeling, I think—and maybe not for the good of the movie, I don’t know—but it was decided that we wouldn’t have them.

You know what’s so funny? God, I hate the Internet. Here’s what happened: we were so careful about not letting the screenplay get out and seen by people, or stolen and put online. But somehow that happened, and in so doing the title page got taken off. This is my sort of detective work in guessing what happened here, but I imagine somebody retyped the title page as Schenectady, New York. So, now, in the lovely world of the Internet, people say—and it just becomes part of the truth of the story—that the original title of this movie was Schenectady, New York, and that somehow along the way I decided to change it to Synecdoche. The title was never Schenectady, New York. It’s not a title I would ever use for anything. I mean, what the hell would I use that for? So, in the lore of the Internet, I changed it after I realized that there was a play on words here, but no, I didn’t.

You have that one line when Caden asks the doctor if it’s serious, and he replies, “We don't know, but yes.”
CK: Yeah, but it isn’t also, because to me that’s the way doctors are. I mean, I think it’s funny, hopefully, but that’s the relationship I often feel with doctors; you're scared and they’ve got this God-like arrogance, and you feel like you're this wormy little sick thing. My favorite thing is when I find a doctor who tells me something is physically wrong with him. It’s so rare, but it’s happened on occasion and it’s like, wow, because I’m surprised. Of course he’s a human being and he’s going to have whatever physical problems he has—he’s not a god—but I can’t get it through my head that they're not, and I think they love that, I think they foster it. But, yeah, for any character I write, I need to feel like I’m writing from their point of view, so even if what they do is absurd, when I write it I have to know why they're doing it. Otherwise it becomes sort of silly to me. If you don't do that, it’s a little Lewis Carroll or something, which there’s nothing wrong with, obviously, but...

Metaphors seem to operate subconsciously as well, even if you can’t verbalize their effect on us.
CK: Well, yeah, I think that’s what dreams do. I’m so astounded by dreams, by my dreams, because I feel like I do my best writing in them, and I’m doing it in real time, or what seems to me to be real time. Like what you were saying about the title, Synecdoche, about which came first; I often have dreams that have a surprise ending that works! And it’s, like, How the hell did I do that? because I’m doing it. I’m thinking that I figure it out in real time, that all these pieces came together. I can’t possibly have it planned for the dream to arrive at this surprise ending, because then I would know what it was, and then it wouldn’t be a surprise. But you get somewhere and there’s a reveal and it’s like, Oh, fuck! As opposed to something that takes me three years to write when I’m awake, I can write a dream in my sleep in a matter of moments.

I set out to not have voice-over in this movie, for example. In order to have the internal experience of the character, which I’m interested in, I decided to project it externally, so that's why the world is interacting with him the way it is. It echoes back to it being the dream state that he’s in, even though I don’t see this movie as a dream. But it is using dream logic and that kind of symbolism and stuff. But, yeah, it was a conscious decision not to have voice-over—the only voice-over that exists in the movie is in the form of other people talking to him, like Millicent instructing him in somebody else’s interior monologue.

There's also some stuff about Hope Leaves the Theater.

It’s so funny, I was doing the New Ear play and with a group of people talking about actors going up on their lines in theater. And Meryl said something like, “That’s the most exciting thing.” It never really occurred to me that an actor would feel that way. I used to act in plays and the idea of forgetting my lines, which has happened to me, is so terrifying, and I love the idea of approaching it from the other way; that this is actually kind of a cool thing to happen and watch because you’re watching this thing, someone maneuver within it, and the other people on stage maneuver and figure out what they need to do, and suddenly you’re awake. [...] What was cool about the New Ear piece to me is that the play stops in real time and the actor yells at the audience, and in a movie you can’t do that because they're not really yelling at you; they're yelling at an imagined audience or an audience that’s on film with them. You don’t feel the threat that you feel when you're at a magic show and you're terrified that the guy’s going to pick on you.

I could copy-paste all day, but it'd be easier if you just read the whole thing yerself, yeah? (PDF / docx.) Big thanks to Jan for taking a hit to the wallet, and for putting in the effort of transcribing!

While the WGA strike continues, Deadline reports that Charlie's Masterclass in Sarajevo saw him firing more shots at the Hollywood system. The Bosnian Cultural Center's main hall was "packed out" to hear him speak, as part of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Sporting a grey WGA-branded “strike” t-shirt, writer-director Charlie Kaufman[...] offered a strong condemnation of the current Hollywood studio system and urged filmmakers to find new ways to create work.

“At this point, the only thing that makes money is garbage. It’s just fascinating. It makes a fortune, and that’s the bottom line,” Kaufman said. “It’s very seductive to the studios but also to the people who engage and become the makers of that garbage, especially if they’re lauded for the garbage because they don’t have to look inward or think long about what they’re doing.”

Kaufman[...] continued to tell the audience full of local and international industry professionals to“make movies outside of the studio system as much as possible and think of ways to do that.”

“I have this pipedream of creating an organization of artists to figure out how to finance and support filmmakers who make things that have value."

He told the audience...

[...] that the wider discussion around the WGA’s “AI issue” is that “writers have been trained to eat and make the garbage too,” meaning writers indulge in and create work that he described as lacking creative ambition and humanity.

“As long as they are in that arena making that shit, then you might as well have AI do it,” Kaufman said.

[...]

“Once you give that up and allow the studios to use AI to write their screenplay, there’s no going back,” he said. “Then there’s no hope because AI can’t create a moment of humanity. As long as people are doing it and there’s that struggle, then there’s always a chance that something will come out of it that will be worth something to human beings.” (Source)

There's more, and you should definitely click through for the rest. Also check out the comments under the article; there are some valid points on both sides of this fence.

via r/kaufman